What Are You Currently Playing? 6.65: Neighbor of the Beast

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I'm aware that I can just replay the last mission in order to get the final two endings, but after that point I feel like I won't be motivated to come back to the game for the side stuff.

[Mustang]

Tried to go back and play Xenoverse just to get the Dragon Ball juices flowing (mainly for the characters from Super alone), but man since the announcement of DBF I do not care at all for the Xenoverse games anymore, which is a bit sad because, to me, they are just mindless fun. Nothing deep or anything. Just an interesting RPG-ish take on grinding.

Popped the disc in and suddenly remembered the random factor that's plagued in the game and I turned it back off. That RNG really killed a lot of my interest.

Anyway, I'll probably end up starting either another Mass Effect run, Uncharted run, or Metal Gear Solid run (finally start MGS5) along with a side of Guilty Gear Rev2.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

That's my thing with the Xenoverse games (and most anime games in general); the games just feel so shallow and awkward to play. If I hadn't been spoiled by more technical Capcom or SNK fighters, I would probably love the brawler type systems of most DB games, but they mostly just end up feeling so empty to me.

Needless to say, DBFZ is the DB game that's right up my alley.

As for what I've been playing, I've made it past the Cleric Beast boss in Bloodborne (the only bods that I've fought do far). I know that this boss is technically optional, but it seemed like the developers intended for you to fight it early on, so I did. So, for me, the main difficulty of this fight didn't really come from the boss itself, but rather the narrow arena that you're forced to fight it in. While this was clearly intentional, I'm personally not a fan of how easy it us to get snagged in corners on this game. Otherwise the fight was pretty fair, but it wasn't really the fun kind of difficult, IMO. I hope it's not a regular thing to have bosses come up in such unfavorable locations for fighting, because the game is a lot of fun otherwise when you don't constantly have to worry about dodging into a wall or piece of geometry by accident.

While I obviously much prefer the combat in Nioh, two things that I will definitely give this and the Souls games over it is the general level design and more varied enemy dispersement. On the former point, I think that while the art design and general aesthetic of Nioh looks gorgeous, the thought and care put into the world-building of the Souls/Borne franchise goes several steps beyond that with how all of it flows together and what every enemy and NPC's place is in it. But beyond that, I like the shades of old-school Zelda design in which you can explore and get to later areas early on and pick up way more useful weapons and items than you're meant to get at that stage of you are daring enough to go down unsafe paths. In regard to the latter point, while most of Nioh's enemies and bosses are masterfully designed from a mechanical standpoint, they start coming at you in very predictable waves, and become less and less intimidating over time, which works well from a character action game standpoint, but once again makes the world of the game seem more disconnected, whereas the enemies in Souls and Bloodborne vary a lot more to suit their respective environments, and on top of having interesting designs, they tend to be very well integrated into the worlds of those games, feeling like just as natural a part of the areas they inhabit as any if the aesthetic architecture or scenery. FromSoftware really put a lot of thought into the narrative design of these games in terms of how the world's which you explore shape the story that you experience with interesting and detailed visual design over expository dialogue or cutscenes. It quite frankly puts most big budget AAA movie games to shame in the story department, IMO.

So yeah, I love Nioh in regard to its amazing gameplay mechanics, whereas find the appeal of the Souls/Borne games to be less in the actual combat specifically, but rather more in everything that surrounds and compliments the combat encounters.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I've been playing a bit more of Transformers Devastation. Very entertaining stuff, though like many other people have pointed out, it does feel like Bayonetta-lite. Like, it literally feels like they recycled a bunch of mechanics from Bayonetta and simplified them for a more casual audience. Not necessarily a bad thing in the context of the kind of game that they were making, but you can tell how rushed and underfunded the development was in order for them to come out with something that reuses so many of their assets from previous games that they've worked on.

[Mustang]

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 - Man, I think the last time I played this game I was still in my old home, and I want to say that was about 4 years ago. This game feels foreign to me now. I've only tried out Nova, Spencer and Hawkeye. I also tried to wave dash (I think that's the term) backwards and while I never was good at it I was at least able to pull it off roughly 2 times without feeling like I'm just mashing buttons. Now I'm just hammering away. It's going to be hell for me when DBFz is released.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Just defeated the Blood Starved Beast in Bloodborne. This was a pretty simple boss fight once you got the pattern down. I wore Father Gascoigne's Hunter uniform in order to drastically raise my resistance to poison, which helped to make that aspect of the fight less overbearing and cumbersome. That said, I didn't like how in the last phase of the fight you ended up becoming poisoned just by being near the boss. The only way around that is to get some distance and spam molotovs for the remainder of the fight, but I didn't have that many left so I just had to finish the fight normally.

Overall I'm loving the game so far, and I'm sure that I'll continue to love it, but the boss fights are definitely the one weakness, IMO. They aren't bad in and of themselves, but rather they give you pretty crappy environments to fight them in. You fight the Cleric Beast on a narrow bridge with wagons and other obstacles in the way, whereas the boss itself is a large creature that takes up most of the width of the bridge and uses large sweeping attacks. Yes, I know how to utilize i-frames to phase through attacks when I dodge, but it doesn't help when I inevitably get snagged in a corner or on some piece of geometry. Father Gascoigne was even worse with all of the tombstones in the way (though I'm ok with the trees since you could use those for cover from his gun). The fact that enemy attacks can clip through geometry doesn't help either. The BSB fight was better in that you generally had more open space to fight it in, but even then you had to stay in the center of the space between the pillars, and it could be annoying waiting for the boss to approach you where you stood if it was behind one of those pillars (and trying to go to fight it in an enclosed space would lead to the same problems as with the previous two fights). I'm sure some people would defend this by saying that this was an intentional way of increasing the challenge, which it is, but I'm saying that it's not a good way of doing it. Games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Nioh, and so on have boss fights take place in more open arenas giving you more space to maneuver, yet still could design interesting and challenging boss fight encounters where all you had to worry about and focus on was the boss itself. With Bloodborne I feel as though the enclosed environments can be more distracting than anything else when it comes to these encounters. On the one hand it's more challenging, but unlike the rest if the gane it's also less fun.

And again, I do love the game overall so far, but this one issue makes me dread the boss fights, and not in the good way.

[Foggle]

I absolutely hate the early bosses in Bloodborne and it's easily one of my favorite games of all time. Blood Starved Beast & Vicar Amelia can fuck off into space forever; meanwhile, Cleric Beast - though easy - is quite badly designed, and Father Gascoigne is way too hard for how early in the game you fight him. Thankfully, some of the later bosses are amazing. Martyr Logarius & Shadows of Yharnam are fantastic and I personally loved the gimmicks of Micolash & Witches of Hemwick. The DLC bosses Ludwig, Orphan of Kos, and Lady Maria are IMO the best in the game and even the entire Souls franchise.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I actually found the BSB to be the easiest boss so far because the arena had more room for me to maneuver and using the fire paper did tons of damage to it; which reminds me of the Umi-Bozu from Nioh that's also extremely weak to fire (easily the worst boss fight of that game, though). I actually don't mind having tough bosses early on. For example, bosses like Murai and Cerberus gave me a lot of trouble on my first time through NGB and DMC3, respectively, but they felt more finely tuned to really test you to see if you had the basics down. Shitty arena aside, I actually like the first phase of the Gascoigne fight. It's kind of cool since he's another Hunter with very similar abilities to your character (sort of like this game's version of Dante vs. Vergil). However his second phase has him go in a frenzy, constantly charging you down in his beast form and barely leaving you any opening to attack. I can't tell you how many times I died due to getting stuck in one place and unable to dodge away because some random piece of geometry was in my way.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Mighty Gunvolt Burst is really good. This absolutely blows Mighty No. 9 away and offers definitive proof that Inticreates should have been given full reign of the game.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So I just got past the Hemwick village area, and it was probably one of the easier areas to clear in this game. I think I died all of one time throughout the whole thing, and that was due to a failed parry on one of the giant axe-wielding beasts towards the end. Fighting it normally was a lot easier to do.

The boss fight itself was the only one that I've beaten on my first try so far. The Witches themselves were mostly very passive and easy to wail on, whereas the creatures that they summoned were incredibly slow and easy to maneuver around. Overall, though, it was a neat little section of the game that I enjoyed quite a bit, especially with the atmosphere and theme of Witches as your primary enemies (Witches have always personally creeped me out more than ghosts or other kinds of monsters).

On a side note, I actually stumbled across the Vicar Amelia boss fight before coming here, but ended up skipping it since I got the feeling that I wasn't at a high enough level to properly take her on yet.

[Foggle]

I actually found the BSB to be the easiest boss so far because the arena had more room for me to maneuver and using the fire paper did tons of damage to it; which reminds me of the Umi-Bozu from Nioh that's also extremely weak to fire (easily the worst boss fight of that game, though). I actually don't mind having tough bosses early on. For example, bosses like Murai and Cerberus gave me a lot of trouble on my first time through NGB and DMC3, respectively, but they felt more finely tuned to really test you to see if you had the basics down. Shitty arena aside, I actually like the first phase of the Gascoigne fight. It's kind of cool since he's another Hunter with very similar abilities to your character (sort of like this game's version of Dante vs. Vergil). However his second phase has him go in a frenzy, constantly charging you down in his beast form and barely leaving you any opening to attack. I can't tell you how many times I died due to getting stuck in one place and unable to dodge away because some random piece of geometry was in my way.

Hm, I meant to respond to this but never did! Personally, I found BSB to be the hardest non-Chalice boss in the game by far, aside from maybe Laurence (the DLC's optional boss). Took me something like 2 hours to beat him. Don't remember how I finally did it but goddamn was it intense. Rest of the bosses after that except Amelia and Ebrietas weren't much trouble for me at all.

I love the first 2/3 of the Father Gascoigne fight, but when he turns into a werewolf it just becomes unfair IMO. Even after finishing the rest of the game I still have trouble beating his wolf form without cheese. Bloodborne's true equivalent of Vergil would be the Lady Maria fight in the DLC. It's so good. Murai is an excellent roadblock boss, but I'm not a huge fan of Cerberus, which I think might honestly be one of the hardest bosses in DMC3. Granted, I do play exclusively on Turbo Mode, so it might not be so bad normally. Either way, I think Murai and Cerberus are a lot better-designed than Gasco is.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Cerberus is one of the toughest bosses in DMC3, I agree; ESPECIALLY on DMD mode where I had to use the gun/switch-cancel strategy with Spiral to cheese him, since I couldn't find a way to beat him normally, but in my defense, enemies and bosses have a ridiculous amount of health on that mode and it takes forever to kill them, which is why I prefer Very Hard as my go-to difficulty for the game. However, Cerberus being ridiculously tough for a first boss is kind of the point, as it forces you to learn the ins and outs of the game. On that end, I don't have a problem with Gascoigne being so tough that early on. My problem with him is the shitty arena that you're forced to fight him in, and as you already said, his final form is cheap. After beating him I checked out a bunch of YouTube tip videos on how to fight him, and even looked up TS17's No Healing Walkthrough of the game. The fact that none of them had a legitimate way to defeat him in his beast form other than cheesing him with Oil and Molotovs or using the Tiny Music Box strategy to do critical damage to him with a backstab and then mashing the attack button while hoping for the best to finish up the fight are basically signs of a poorly designed boss.

Though, since we're comparing boss fights between these games, Gascoigne at least isn't nearly as bad as Arkham in DMC3's second-to-last mission. I'll take his shitty arena, questionable hit detection, and annoying final phase over either phase of the Arkham fight any day (though the second phase is especially worse).

[Avaitor]

So we might be getting some more Wii-U games ported to the Switch.

Score! It seems like this is the future, after all- restoring last gen games rather than allowing backwards compatibility. If enough of the Wii-U games I've been meaning to check make it to the Switch, I may just skip the Wii-U.

[VLordGTZ]

So guess who got Splatoon 2 early?

My local Target for some reason started selling download codes for the game today.  At first, I thought it was just a pre-load, but it's letting me actually play the game.  I guess I got really lucky. 

[gunswordfist]

Replayed the beginning of SOTN to try out my brand new Xbox 360 power cord. So far so good! Now off to more Odallus right now since I am on my Metroidvania kick.